🔥Welcome to Volume #00102!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
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☀️Bits of Advice from 45 Rotations Around the Sun ☀️
Start with Intention. The biggest game changer is being intentional in our actions... when we know our why before we do something, we magnify our effects.
Cultivate Our Mindset. We want to show up with a growth mindset, leaning into possibilities and potential. We want to be curious and figure things out.
Notice What We Notice. When we notice, we sit in a position of openness with ourselves and the world around us. Notice when we get surprised. Notice when we are wrong.
It's always "Good"... I took this idea from Jocko Willinik. No matter what happens to us, we respond with "good." It's cold or rainy, "Good," we get to practice being uncomfortable. We didn't get promoted, "Good," now we get to work on our skills for the next opportunity. Good means we see the positive in everything that happens.
Think Obliquely. Instead of looking at everything linearly, we think outside the box, upside down, inside out, and any other means we typically don't use. We see the "problem" in a new light and find new answers.
There is no Finish Line. We see the journey as the destination, knowing we never reach it. That means we never lose and never win. We get to keep playing.
Create Visions and Vibes. We need to know in the direction we want to go. We start with the vision knowing things will change along the way.
Do the Work. We need to do the work. Doing the work lego blocks together possibilities.
Chase the Right Discomfort When we do uncomfortable things, they show us how much more we can do. When we embrace discomfort, we find ways to be comfortable.
Create the Right Culture. We get to decide the kind of culture we want to be in.
Keep Going. Show up. Never stop showing up, growing up, and going.
Do Our Best. That is the most that we can do.
Bias to Action. Always start with action.
Make Play our Default State. Everything we do is play. When we get lost, we need to come back to the play. When we get frustrated or stuck, we need to look for play. That is our yellow brick road to getting back on the path.
Run Experiments. Experiments help us start and let us test things. When we experiment, we get to see what happens. They make it less threatening and make us more open to doing it and seeing the results. When we run experiments, we plant seeds to see what grows.
Maintaining, Managing and Giving Energy. Surround ourselves with people that give us energy. Give that energy right back. Run energy audits. These allow us to see how our energy ebbs and flows. We can see what tasks, interactions, and people give us and drain our energy. We can eliminate and add tasks based on the results.
Dance. Find a couple of moments to dance every day...whatever makes you move.
Give Compliments. Compliments keep people going. Be quick to compliment others when they do exceptional work.
Movement is Medicine. Move every day as often as possible.
Take Radical Ownership. Take responsibility for our actions and push things forward. We chose hard things for an easy life and easy things for a hard life.
Create Systems and Processes. These make sure we do the things we care about doing.
Build a wisdom practice. Wisdom starts by remaining curious and asking questions.
Have mentors we've never met. The best mentors are the ones that are there for us no matter what. These are the mentors we've never met. We read their books and draw from their experiences; they can never let us down.
Ask the Best Version of Ourselves. My favorite meditation is breathing into a meeting with my better, wiser self. I'm sitting on my surfboard, waiting for waves in Costa Rica. Next to me sits my older and wiser self. We chat about anything that currently occupies my mind space.
Appropriate fear. All-time great NBA coach Greg Popovich tells his players to fear opponents and situations properly. We don't take things for granted, and we think in probabilities.
There are no Magicians. No one knows the answers, and everyone deals with challenges. It is a gift because everyone is trying to figure it out, just like us.
Embrace the Magic There aren't magicians, but there is Magic. It shows up in sunrises and sunsets. We need to remember to embrace the magical moments.
Make it Better ... Life is better when we aim to improve things.
Live our best lives now. I once talked with a wise elder, and when telling him what I wanted to do, he kept asking me why I was not doing that now. I spoke with another wise elder, and she asked me that same question. What happens if we live our best life right now?
Create Rituals and Routines. Make them around the things that matter and the things that we want to make sure we keep doing. It can be as small as morning walks or as big as ensuring we show up with intention.
Be Consistent. Daily routines, rinsing, and repeating are reserved for the things that mean the most to us. Consistency creates the us that we want to see in the world.
Celebrate. We must celebrate the little wins, the big successes, and the beauty of everyday moments. We use our celebrations to appreciate our work and keep us on our path.
Start Sooner. The best time was yesterday, and the next best time is now.
Find the Right Scoreboards. What we measure matters. We transform due to the things that drive us. Aligning the right incentives makes the right us. Don't get stuck chasing the wrong scoreboards.
Know When to Move On When done, move on, no matter how painful moving on feels. We get to close doors to open doors. New doors take us to new places. We can always open up a closed door.
Start with gratitude. When you start there, everything in life is easier.
Find Sparing Partners. Coaches, teachers, mentors, and people that inspire us all help propel us forward.
Right People, Right Place, Right Time. These are what we are looking for.
Make sure to fill up our cup - We need to know what fills up our cup and make sure to replenish it. Hattip to Coach Dave Frost.
Pay Attention to our Diets... Food, Information, Ideas, People... Make sure that we ingest things that serve us.
We are all Leaders. Leadership starts with our own actions.
Always Prune. If you are in a position of power, eradicate cancers that destroy energy and hurt our teammates, colleagues, and organizations... life is too short, and we only hurt people we care about. No matter our standing, always be pruning,
Sharing is Caring. Focus on what gifts you can share with others.
Align our Values with our Actions and align our actions with our dreams and desires.
Never assume Malice for Ignorance. We never know the struggles or challenges others experience. Give people breaks, but it doesn't mean we need to subject ourselves to them.
Time is Precious. 1,440 minutes in the day / 4,732 weeks in our lives... Use them well.
Be kind to ourselves and the people around us.
Golden Rule ++. Always treat people better than you want to be treated; you don't know what they are dealing with.
Learn something new every day. Learning keeps us curious and growing, also reminding us how much we don't know.
Attention is the most important thing we have; use it wisely. Distractions keep increasing, don't get caught in their grasp.
Be Different. Do things that "aren't like you" to grow and expand our range of possibilities
Stay Away From No Growth Cultures....Including organizations, leaders, and bosses that aren't working on improving themselves... We become the people we are around.
Make Beautiful Art. Find ways to make, share and build things.
The Gift of Not Knowing. Appreciate that we will never know the answers to the most pressing questions, which is a gift, not a curse.
Find Flow Each and Everyday.... Figure out the things that give you flow and do them frequently.
Age is not an Excuse. We are always young enough to start. Feeling that we are too old only makes it much better when we start and end up amazing ourselves.
Train with our kids, family, and people we love. Nothing is better than struggling and leveling up with the people we love.
There is no Perfect. We only need to be good for ourselves. That is our goal. Getting caught up in expectations and perfection hurts us.
Find Community. Find the right communities to propel us and push us to new heights. We don't do anything alone and need the wind that folks put in our sails.
How Can We Help? When in doubt, lean into the helping. Pay it forward.
Embrace change because all of life is change. We are never the same, and the world is never the same.
Always Connect. Life is connection. Connect with family, friends, colleagues, community, and nature. All life is connected. If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be to connect more and to connect deeper.
Play Infinite Games with Infinite Players
🧠Things to Think About🧠
Cedric Chin Chases Deliberate Practice to Compete at Judo
Cedric moved to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, to train for the Senior National Judo Championships. He wanted to make up for past regrets and focus on deliberate practice.
In our career, deliberate practice becomes tough. Getting repetitions and true feedback is hard. Practicing for a sport transcends those limitations.
Cedric’s biggest factors for improving included:
The three biggest things that my coach told me to do that made a difference, were, to my surprise:
I regulated my body language. (“If you’re in pain, don’t show it. If you’re tired, don’t show it. If you’re hungry, nobody should know.”)
I started to apply the following mental frame, from a video clip of a tennis coach that he sent me: “The difference between the champions and all the other players, is that the champions find a way to win when they play their worst tennis. You have to focus on what you can control. The most common mistake is to try to feel good, or try to play good. But this is not something you can control. My number one advice is don’t focus on yourself, but focus on the strategy to win the points, knowing what you have today. Because when you focus on you and your problems, you don’t focus on the opponent. My second piece of advice work on your body language and your attitude. The body language comes from the way you speak to yourself. So find a way to talk to yourself in a way that helps you have the best possible body language, which will help you also keep positive, and help you keep the focus on the game and not on yourself. The champions, on a bad day, focus only on those two things, and forget all the rest that they have no control over.” I don’t know why applying this frame works, but it does.
Finally, and most bizarrely, I started building a ritual before each day’s training. I created a three song playlist that I would listen to on loop on the way to the dojo, and I would use the music as a prompt to think about fighting hard for the day. I got this idea from a podcast interview with Josh Waitzkin, who used an Eminem song as an aural trigger for his martial arts competitions. It seemed like a good idea when I first heard of it. I’m pleased to report that it works.
Americans Over 50 Doing Extreme Sports
Great article about ordinary people being extraordinary by mainly getting after it and putting themselves out there.
Nyad dreamed in her youth of swimming from Cuba to Florida, what she calls the “Everest of all of the Earth’s ocean swims,” 110 miles rife with risks from sharks, poisonous jellyfish and stiff currents. No one had done it without a shark cage, and Nyad herself failed four times. After a three-decade break, she was inspired to try again after her mother died, at 82, when Nyad was in her late 50s.
“I thought … is it possible that, even as good shape that I’m in, that I’m only going to live some 20 more years?” she said. “I made friends with [the late actor] Christopher Reeve … and he had said to me, ‘Are you satisfied with your life? You’re not chasing any big dreams anymore.’ And I just sat around thinking, ‘I’ve become a spectator. I’m not a doer anymore. And there’s that dream out there; it’s still alive. Nobody has swum from Cuba to Florida.’”
In 2013, on her fifth try, Nyad became the first person to complete the swim, when she was 64
The WSJ ran this piece about a 50 year old who gets a faster marathon time every year
Turing 45 and I’m looking around to find people that perspire and inspire me to keep going.
First of all his last name is Rideout, which is strong. Second of all he had a rough childhood with his dad and brother ending up in prison along with an opioid addiction while working in finance.
He beat that adversity and channeled it into training. He used movement to defeat the demon of addiction.
Now, at 51, Mr. Rideout is considered one of the planet’s top marathon master athletes, a category of runner age 40 or older. In recent years, his times at some major marathons have kept dropping. He has won the 50-and-over division at two of the six Abbott World Marathon Majors: New York in 2021 and Boston in 2022. And he has come in second in that age division in three others: London, Chicago and Berlin. He hopes to continue his run of success when he competes in the Tokyo Marathon on March 4.
“When I’m warming up with the pros, I still have voices in my head saying I don’t belong there,” says Mr. Rideout. “But I’ve learned to embrace a champion mind-set and think, I can beat you.” At the start of the BMW Berlin Marathon last September, he found himself warming up with Eliud Kipchoge, a Kenyan runner widely considered to be the best marathoner ever. Rather than be intimidated, he gave him a fist bump.
Bloomberg on the Power of Sidewalks Getting People to Walk
Our environment effects us greatly. This study shows the importance of sidewalks and obesity.
The study was based on an analysis of 164 million Google Street View images harvested from across the US — a vast database of urban, suburban and rural roadways. Students trained a computer model to recognize and label various built environment features; the images were then compared to demographic and socioeconomic data from the US Census Bureau, as well as health data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Researchers found that neighborhoods equipped with markers of urban development like sidewalks and crosswalks were linked to reductions in obesity and high blood pressure, for example. Similarly, more road signs and street lights correlated with lower prevalence of high cholesterol and even cancer, as well as reduced depression and smoking.
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
Conversations with Tyler and Glenn Lowery
Tyler Cowen talks with Glenn Lowery, an acclaimed economics professor from Brown. Glenn lived an interesting life, and beyond being a gifted thinker, drug addiction while he was a professor of economics at Harvard.
LOURT: In it, I tell the story of being addicted to freebasing crack cocaine in the late ’80s. I went into treatment, and I went to a halfway house, and I went and I fought. Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, the support of my lovely wife, the late economist Linda Loury. Thank God for her, for the church, that community that took me in, and so on, and I kicked it.
But I thought I was missing something. I thought that there was a kind of fun, a kind of excitement, a kind of sensation of euphoria. Having gone two years sober, I took myself back to one of my places where I would cop. I bought a little cocaine. I prepared it, and I smoked it. The feelings of euphoria came back just as I had remembered them, but also with them came a sense of shame. There was no doubt that I was experiencing a titillation, a euphoric sensation. There was “happiness” there.
But having gone through, as it were, the valley of the shadow of death, and having emerged from it to the arms of a loving wife who stuck with me and a young family that was coming along — my sons Glenn and Nehemiah, who are in their 30s now. Having done all of that, I asked myself, “Is this what you were willing to risk everything for?”
COWEN: Let’s take the part of the white right wing that really likes you. I know there are different phases in your thought, but overall, they really like you. What’s the main point or insight they are missing when it comes to race that you would like them to know but they don’t?
LOURY: Thanks for asking that question. I think I have an answer. Those people who are languishing in the ghettos, the housing projects, the lockups, the emergency rooms of the hospital wards, the ones who are doing the carjackings, the ones who are doing the crazy shit that you see when you turn on your television and you look at what’s going on in Chicago or Baltimore or St. Louis or Philadelphia — those people are us. They’re our people. Those are Americans. They are us. That’s us. It’s not them.
That’s what I’d like them to understand. I don’t think that my right-wing acolytes — I don’t think many of them get that. I think they think this is an alien imposition upon an otherwise more or less pristine Euro-American canvas. They think there are shithole pockets of America that they need to protect themselves from. True enough, they do sometimes need to protect themselves, but those are our people over there. That’s our failure. This is an American story, not a black American story.
Conversations with Tyler and Rick Rubin
Rick on how to be a better listener
RUBIN: I would start with the thought to truly hope to understand what the other person is saying. Most of us, when listening, are formulating an opinion, either in response—what are we going to say in response? What do I think about this? Or looking for something to disagree with, or a piece to latch onto. We take a little piece and then tune out from what’s being said. Any ability to turn our own filters off, forget about what we think, not be analytical at all, and only listen with the idea of truly understanding what the person is communicating.
Then asking questions if there’s anything that we don’t completely understand or anything that might be different, anything that seems odd that the person is saying. I’m not saying challenge them. I’m saying, “Oh, why is that the case? How did you get to that?”
When we truly open ourselves to people, they tell us everything, and we can learn a tremendous amount.
COWEN: What have you learned from Sherlock Holmes stories?
RUBIN: To look closely at things, to look deeper, to pay attention, to notice what maybe others aren’t noticing.
RUBIN: I think they’re the same thing. I think creativity is acts of noticing. Nothing comes from us. The creator isn’t making the thing. The creator is recognizing the thing, noticing the thing, and then sharing it in a way where the audience can hopefully get a glimpse of what we’ve noticed.
RUBIN: I guess the thing that I took away as most astounding was when a song would pop up in the movie, out of seeming boredom. Just a song would pop up, and it would be songs that we’ve listened to our entire lives. It was thrilling, and it was a reminder of, that’s what it’s always like. Yes, on the one hand, it’s shocking, and on the other hand, that’s what it’s always like.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
"A man can only stumble for so long before he either falls or stands up straight.” (Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension)
"The problem is that so many of us discount the value of minutes and overestimate the value of an hour or a day or a weekend. We dither away our minutes as if they were useless, assuming that creativity can only happen in increments of an hour or a day or more.” (Matthew Dicks)
"Boyd said if a man can reduce his needs to zero, he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him." (Robert Coram, Boyd)
"The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment." (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow)
"Our challenge is to be more aware of our emotional states and proactively manage their effects on our thinking and learning to increase their positive effects and decrease their negative effects as best we can." (Edward D. Hess, Learn or Die)
"Telling someone to change makes it less rather than more likely that they will. This is because people almost never change without first feeling understood." (Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, Difficult Conversations)
"If the person does engage in daily, intensive self-improvement, perhaps eschewing more typical and more social pursuits, there is a greater chance they are the kind of creative obsessive who can make a big difference" (Tyler Cowen, Talent)
True love gives us beauty, freshness, solidity, freedom, and peace. True love includes a feeling of deep joy that we are alive. If we don’t feel this way when we feel love, then it’s not true love. - How to Love, Thich Nhat Hanh and Jason DeAntonis
"I’ve discovered that even when you’re in charge, you are often much more effective asking questions than giving orders." (Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman, A Curious Mind)
"In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students-and adults-become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching." Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
"Labels keep us all in our assigned places. At root, that’s why we’re divided." (Irshad Manji, Don't Label Me)
"I don’t want to know how a thirty-year-old became rich and famous; I want to hear how an eighty-year-old spent her life in obscurity, kept making art, and lived a happy life." (Austin Kleon, Keep Going)
"As people come closer to death, I have found that only two questions really matter to them: “Am I loved?” and “Did I love well?”” (Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations)
"Neufeld sums up eloquently what all young ones, whatever their temperament, need first and foremost: “Children must feel an invitation to exist in our presence, exactly the way they are.”" (Gabor Maté, MD, The Myth of Normal)
"The deeper the source we work from, the better our stuff will be—and the more transformative it will be for us and for those we share it with." (Steven Pressfield, Do the Work)
"Before entering into a conversation, or even greeting someone at work or on the street, find something you respect about the person you are about to engage. You don’t even have to tell him about it. Just notice how your respect changes the way you speak to him." (Sakyong Mipham)
🙏Thanks for Reading🙏
What ideas have you picked up during your rotations around the sun?
Namaste,
Christian
☀️Bits of Advice from 45 Rotations Around the Sun ☀️